First playtest of… Science!

A couple of weeks ago, I had my science guy and another 3 friends over to test the science game, one of which has not been involved in any of the design.

My biggest takeaway - it was really fun! I was worried that playtesting would be boring and people wouldn’t like doing it. Time is so precious to adults and if I’m going to convince a bunch of my friends to come over, it should be to drink beer with no responsibilities and play a game that we know is going to work. That was my fear at least and it proved unfounded.

We learned some things about balancing, how big components needed to be but we changed very few rules. The rules are more-or-less sound. They’re quick to teach, the gameplay fits in nicely in the time allocated and the decisions where tough.

In terms of the changes I need to make: The biggest one is how we keep track of the techs that you unlock and how you tell the players what the technologies do once you unlock them. After thinking about it for a few days, I realize that cards are the way to go. That does mean I need to create hundreds of cards so that they can be given out to the players whenever they learn a new tech. I’m going to do a little graphic design, print them all out, laminate the and cut them to shape. A little work but I think it’s a good change that solves a lot of our problems. Each card has the name of the tech and tells you what it does (solving the first problem - informing you what they do). Because they’re physical objects, it allows them to be handed to the players and delivered to the correct location in order to be spent (solving another problem - informing other areas of new bonuses).

Anyway, since then I’ve been designing, printing, laminating and cutting them all to size. I’ve spent days doing this! And it’s the reason I was keen to avoid cards in the first place. Making changes to this on the fly is going to be difficult.